by James Palmer
This fed into the Revolution itself. The denunciations of middle management, factory overseers and village heads were at least as motivated by the desire to take over their positions as any ideological fervour. With new agricultural techniques developed during the worldwide green revolution reverberating even in China, farmers were producing more than ever before. But the job situation in the cities was poor, even in an industrial powerhouse like Tangshan. In theory, every citizen was supposed to have a danwei (work unit) and a job; in practice, tens of millions of young adults survived on their parents’ incomes and worked at whatever was available.
Even relatively comfortable families couldn’t afford much. The average worker’s income was about 300 yuan a year – roughly $115 at 1976 exchange rates. One yuan would buy five kilos of potatoes, or a treat like a honey melon, or two packs of cigarettes, or five packs of cherry gum, or ten packs of nuts.
Household phone lines were completely unknown; only major institutions and businesses had phones, and making a call involved going through operator after operator. The four great luxuries were a sewing machine, a watch, a bicycle (ideally a ‘Flying Pigeon’, a Tianjin brand that became synonymous with prosperity) and a radio, all of which required months of saving. Monochrome photographs were treasured mementos, and a village or a factory would consider itself lucky if it had a single black-and-white TV. Toilet paper was an urban luxury, and soft toilet paper unknown. Confectionery was limited to a few brands, such as the much-prized ‘White Rabbit’ vanilla sweets of Shanghai.
Factory workers described daily life back then as:
. . . just like living in North Korea now, I imagine.2 It was very normal. You’d get up, go to the factory, have political meetings afterwards, come back home, sleep, just like that. We didn’t have big dreams. Everything was paid for by the country. You just wanted to be warm and have enough to eat, though the really hungry times were over by the seventies.
Status didn’t make life much better, except for government officials, who enjoyed entertainment budgets that allowed for luxurious banquets. Zhu Yinlai was a university student, which was a rare and privileged thing in 1976. He hadn’t had things easily before, though. At seventeen, Zhu had been a ‘sent-down youth’, bundled from the city into the countryside in 1968. Millions of ‘educated youth’ were sent ‘up to the mountains, and down to the valleys’ to lose their soft city privileges and learn from the peasants. It was part of a wider response to the rampages of the Red Guards; dispersed and sent into the countryside, the young couldn’t escape control as they had in the wild years of 1966 – 8.
For most, it was a hideous experience. They were thrown into communities that didn’t want useless, unskilled extra mouths. Some found a second home with kind families, others were left entirely to their own resources, sometimes in the hardest landscapes in China. One student, exiled from Tangshan to a village only a couple of dozen miles away that he found grindingly dirty, backward and hostile, made a small crossbow to hunt birds for his supper. Many died through exhaustion, starvation or accident; they were often called upon to operate machinery with which they had no acquaintance, or to fight natural disasters like forest fires for which they were utterly unprepared. Others, especially young women, were sexually abused by local cadres. Suicide was common.
Zhu had had to do everything for himself: cook, clean, wash, dig and mend. He was constantly hungry; the villagers gave him meagre rations, and he learned to eat whatever he could find. He became adept at improvising and scrounging. Having survived his rural exile, he was now twenty-five, and relatively privileged. He had managed to get into the re-opened Mining and Technology University when it resumed classes in 1974.
Tangshan was an academic backwater, but even the small technical colleges there had seen ideological clashes in the late sixties; the ‘College Union’ and ‘Red Guards’, which were mostly made up of students, had brawled with the ‘Big Red Flag’, who were factory workers and miners. The conflict had never reached the levels of everyday murder seen in other cities, but there had been deaths, as each faction strove to prove itself more revolutionary than the other.
Of late the situation was more peaceful – and boring. Zhu’s department, mining engineering, had sixty students, but only ten of them were women, and Zhu and his friends had no chance of dating any of them. The students lived in six-storey concrete blocks, five to a room, and ate corn mush twice a day, sometimes with scraps of meat. The only source of entertainment was a film every Saturday night. Occasionally they would try to sneak into the nearby militia headquarters to see more films, because there was nothing else to do other than study and exercise.
The choice of films was not extensive. Before the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese film industry had produced about a film a week, as well as importing Soviet movies. In a typical weekend in the 1950s, for instance, a cinemagoer could pick between Chinese films like Pi Pa Lane, An Ideological Question, The Dove of Peace and Stand Up Sisters! or Soviet perennials like Lenin in October, The Fall of Berlin and the children’s film Big Turnip. Even some of the movies from the great pre-war era of Shanghai film-making were still shown.
Now anything made prior to 1966 was banned. Occasional exceptions slipped past the guards of cinematic purity, like the ‘old fighting trilogy’ of war movies, Tunnel Warfare, Mine Warfare and Fighting North and South. Other banned movies could be screened as ‘negative examples’, either by political enthusiasts or film buffs. No new films had been made during the first seven years of the Cultural Revolution, except for the adaptation of model operas and ballets. In the last three years, however, there had been a miniature revival in the film industry, which was one reason Zhu and other students were so keen to get to the movies.
Compared to others in China, their diet of weekly movies was positively rich. For village youths, seeing a film required extensive organisation. Mo Yan, who grew up to be a great novelist of the 1980s, once described the elaborate procedure he had to go through to see a film as a rural kid in the sixties. He made friends with the operator of his county’s only phone, and bribed a shoe repairer who owned a bicycle, and so could travel around the countryside and report on any movie screenings. Eventually, after months of waiting, word came through that The Red Detachment of Women was going to be screened that evening in the next county, prompting Mo and his friends to run cross-country for three hours to get there on time.
The lengths people would go to in order to see movies seems baffling, given how appallingly crude most of them were. Only thirty-four films had been made during the Cultural Revolution, most of which were clumsily didactic, like the recent Song of the Mango, about the struggle against enemies of the revolution by a workers’ propaganda team in a technical institute; The Fiery Years, in which a steelworker uncovers foreign spies and domestic saboteurs in his factory; and Breaking With Old Ideas, where peasant students teach out-of-date professors the importance of learning from the people.
But in a culturally and visually starved country, movies were one of the few sources of fantasy. The most popular films were foreign – meaning Albanian, North Korean and North Vietnamese. They were just as propagandistic, but they were at least different. The 1972 North Korean weepie The Flower Seller, purportedly based on a novel by the country’s dictator, Kim Il Sung, had audiences across the country sobbing into their handkerchiefs. Another kind of film-going pleasure could be glimpsed in the popular stills pinned up on dormitory walls, which showed the heroine of the most famous model opera, The Red Detachment of Women, doing split-legged shots in loose silk pyjamas.
Elsewhere, students were more adventurous. Samizdat literature circulated, surreptitiously copied on factory machines and discussed in clandestine literary salons. Sometimes these copies were made by hand, allowing the insertion of satirical references to local politics. With millions of restless and underemployed young people, Catcher in the Rye and On the Road were exceptionally popular among those who could get them.
In Tangshan there w
as little literary activity and the most common form of escape was into nineteenth-century novels, especially those of Stendhal, Dickens and Balzac. As in the Soviet Union, Western social realist novels enjoyed a limited tolerance as examples of the sufferings of the poor under capitalism, but many readers found in them a vision of a larger, freer world, far more compelling than the one they lived in.
The very young had their own games. Zhang Youlu was eight years old in 1976, a skinny whelp living in rural poverty. He lived in a small village on the outskirts of the city, the second of four children. His childhood was one of gnawing hunger, squabbling over food with his siblings and being taught to scavenge for edible plants from a young age. Much of their diet was made up of bobo, corn cakes stuffed with vegetable leaves. They had no toys, and instead amused themselves by playing with cast-off metal scraps from the factories, pushing them around with sticks. Alternatively, they played soldier; some of them had older brothers (or, in rare cases, sisters) in the People’s Liberation Army. The PLA were always the good guys, but the villains shifted; sometimes they were Japanese, at other times Nationalists or vaguely defined counter-revolutionaries.
It was only a couple of kilometres from his village to the industrial area, but it was a different world. The villages were small, often with only thirty or forty households and a couple of hundred people, but clustered closely together. In a few places it was literally a stone’s throw from one to the next, as sometimes demonstrated practically in fights between villages.
Being hungry was nothing new in the countryside, where over thirty million people had died in the Great Leap Forward. Agricultural reform and innovation were beginning to solve China’s persistent food insecurity, but population pressures and the sheer inefficiency of collectivised agriculture meant that most people remained, at best, prisoners of a subsistence lifestyle.
Even in 1976, everything was rationed. People still starved, or were so malnourished that ordinarily survivable diseases carried them away. In the city, there was a system of coupons, which were often illicitly traded. In the countryside villagers earned a certain share of the commune’s produce. The amount depended, in theory, on how hard they worked. But the most ardently Stakhanovite labourer couldn’t compensate for a bad family background or a family squabble with the village head: ‘black’ families were routinely given half or a quarter of the food of those with more acceptable backgrounds. A man could starve to death because his grandfather had been a cloth merchant.
A ‘black’ family of six might be allocated only 500 kilos of rice and 50 kilos of cooking oil for the whole year. Farmers were allowed to keep small private gardens, typically a half mu (about a twentieth of a hectare) of land for a household. They often cultivated other scraps of land, growing sweet potatoes, and ate ‘any green plant’ they found growing wild. Village leaders deliberately under-reported the amount of land the village owned year after year to reduce government demands.
The foundation of the PRC had brought one great blessing to the countryside: peace. Armies of ‘grey rats’, as soldiers were called, no longer swept back and forth, pillaging crops, extorting ‘taxes’ and conscripting those who couldn’t bribe their way out of military service. Older villagers remembered the yo-yoing of armies as they struggled for control of the region, one group of soldiers arriving to steal whatever the previous contingent had missed.
But peace came at the cost of forced collectivisation, a state as predatory and vicious as any mercenary army, and the destruction or neglect of traditional village rights and customs. The worst times had been in the Great Leap Forward, but even after the end of that first period of ideological madness, agricultural policies were dictated from the centre by know-nothing officials, sometimes based on the pseudo-scientific theories of Soviet ‘peasant scientist’ Trofim Lysenko. They ignored the complex and intensely localised nature of village economics and needs, forcing them into a crude one-size-fits-all model.
One of the cruellest aspects of the system was that it stripped away one of the most basic rights of small farmers everywhere: voting with their feet. The Chinese had always moved around, both in response to disaster and in search of opportunities. Until the 1950s, it was moderately unusual for someone to have both grandparents born in the same province. Calamities like famine or invasion pushed hundreds of thousands of people away from their homes, while growing cities like Shanghai drew millions looking for a future better than farming. It shaped reputations; the people of Henan, one of the larger provinces in China’s heavily populated east, had a bad name as beggars and crooks because the region was exceptionally vulnerable to natural disaster, and Henanese refugees were a common sight.
Marxist-Leninist rhetoric demanded that the Chinese past be described as ‘feudal’, and the farmers as ‘serfs’, a clumsy imposition of European terms on a very different historical reality. But the imposition of the hukou (residence permit) system in 1958 brought the Chinese countryside closer to serfdom than any previous regime. Without the right hukou, farmers couldn’t get food or housing, thus fixing them permanently in one region. It also made it easier for the regime to draft the rural population for corvée labour, putting millions of men to work on megaprojects – for which their families had to supply the food. Household registration and manpower control had been tried by previous governments in China, but never with this ruthless efficiency.
A rural hukou also made it exceptionally difficult for the holder to move to the city – another blow at one of the traditional escape routes. The villages had always depended on the cities, and people moved between them constantly. Now that was impossible. In the cities, those without the right permits were periodically rounded up and dumped back in the countryside by the truckload. In the Great Leap Forward, rural hukou holders, bound fast to the commune system, had starved while those with urban hukou continued to receive rations.
In the seventies the consequences were less fatal, though even in good times an urban hukou could bring three or four times the amount of food a country household received. Instead of starvation, the system produced a surplus of frustrated young men and women. In the past they would have sought work in the cities, becoming, at least at first, dofu vendors, umbrella sellers, professional beggars, builders, prostitutes, pedlars and cooks. Instead, most of them were condemned to eternal peasantry.
They still tried to get away – the ‘floating population’ of vagabonds and casual labourers was already reaching the low millions, and bus and train stations were so busy, even late at night, that militias worked overtime to track down ‘wandering criminals’ without the right permits, beat and lock them up, and deport them back to their home town. (In sharp contrast, the countryside around Tangshan nowadays is positively geriatric; the young have taken off to become part of the army of migrant workers.)
Ambitions weren’t dead, even if they were limited. Plenty of young women, for instance, dreamt of being dancers in the same way as girls today fantasise about being movie stars or pop idols. In 1976, that meant working for a propaganda troupe, walking for dozens of miles between remote villages to perform set-pieces promoting the government and the revolution. But this was better than a future spent assembling pots or hoeing fields.
For young people, there was something off key about the constant rhetoric of ‘Struggle! Oppose! Crush!’ that still dominated political life. The militant era of the late sixties was dead, and the contrast between the dramatic language and the repetitive nature of compulsory political activity was obvious to the young. Their older siblings or younger aunts and uncles had dreamt of furthering or cleansing the revolution; this generation had more practical expectations. Like Yu Xuebing (‘Learn from the army’) or Yang Wuyi (Wuyi is literally ‘Five-one’, or May 1/Labour Day), they had been named after patriotic or revolutionary concepts, but they didn’t have the grand goals to go with these names. That was partly because they could remember their earlier years and contrast them with the realities of their adolescence. In the economic mini-boom
of the mid-sixties, life seemed to be getting visibly better, but they were then caught up in the stagnation and political confusion of the seventies.
They had enough education to feel discontented with their parents’ lifestyle, and they found Maoist rhetoric increasingly bereft of relevance or meaning for their lives. ‘Our parents only wanted to fill all our bellies,’ one young farmer remarked; ‘We young people want more out of life than that.’3
This was particularly the case in the countryside, where improvements in rural education, even as the university system was being destroyed, had created a semi-educated, ambitious generation. As one sent-down youth put it, ‘It’s the younger peasants who’ve been through several years of schooling. They simply don’t want to work in the fields . . . They dream of working in factories, shops or government offices.’4
For the Red Guards, the Cultural Revolution had held out politics as salvation. This generation didn’t believe those promises, but that didn’t mean political activity couldn’t be exciting. A good rally was fun; it was exhilarating, particularly at a time when there was so little else to do, to shout and pump fists and wave banners.
Sometimes it had the reassuring familiarity and community of ritual. The most overtly religious elements of the personality cult, such as the morning praise and self-dedication performed in front of Mao’s statue, and the self-examination of one’s conduct against Mao’s instructions before bedtime, had disappeared after the fall of Lin Biao five years earlier. Regular readings from Mao’s works were still often a part of office, factory or village life, and political invocations, denunciations and performance formed the rituals of everyday life as prayers, Masses, and saints’ days once did in a Catholic village.
